


desiderata

by dirtybinary



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes's Notebooks, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, background Steve Rogers/Peggy Carter - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-17
Updated: 2016-11-17
Packaged: 2018-08-31 11:49:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8577346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: There's a new night guard at the Smithsonian. The Winter Soldier is on a reconnaissance mission, and in a way, so is Steve.





	

 

> **desiderata**
> 
> /dɪˌzɪdəˈrɑːtə, -ˈreɪtə,-ˌsɪd-/  
>  plural noun, singular _desideratum  
>  _
> 
>   1. things wanted or needed
> 

> 
> Synonyms: essentials, necessities, requisites, sine qua nons;  
>  see also: missing things.

 

The man on the bridge comes to the museum for the third day running.

He should probably have a new name. For one thing, he is no longer on the bridge. For another, he is now also the man on the helicarrier and the man in the Potomac and, at present, the man three feet away from the Smithsonian night guard, offering a smile that is equal parts strained and hopeful. “You come here often,” he says.

It is a question with the question mark left off. “I work here,” says the night guard. He taps one gloved finger on the corner of the access ID clipped to his breast pocket, even though the man has not asked for proof. 

“Ah,” says the man, glancing at the card and the false name on it. Hesitantly, he adds, “I’m Steve.” 

“Pleased to meet you,” the night guard says, flippantly easy; and tries to feel nothing when the man’s face falls.

 

 

All the Winter Soldier ever does is want.

After the Potomac, want was a drive to _go_ and keep going until he reached someplace he would never be found. Then came hunger and thirst and fatigue and a maddening fear, the kind that makes eyeballs show their whites. And now there are wants more troublesome still, that cannot be satisfied with a burger or a cup of hot chocolate and do not go away, like itches that cannot be scratched. He learns early on that wants do not wait politely in line—they converge all at once in a kaleidoscope of unpleasant colours, each one tinting and amplifying the others, so he can barely tell them apart. 

Fortunately, the Soldier is a versatile field agent, not easily overwhelmed by the vagaries of a mission.

After several days of pondering, he finds a scrap of old paper and a ballpoint pen and prints, in big bold capitals across the top, **_DESIDERATA_**. This is a fancy Latin word that means something along the lines of _desired things_. The Soldier does not know why he knows fancy Latin words, but this one pleases him with its succinctness, its precision, like a clean shot between the eyes. He thinks a bit more, and then writes, _1\. The man on the bridge._  

This seems a bit on the vague side, and there is no room for vagueness in mission parameters. The Soldier chews on the end of his pen. He adds:

  * _who?_
  * _why?_
  * _Bucky???_



And then, at the bottom, _UNDERSTAND_.

This reduces the vast expanse of the unknown to a few undefined variables, well within the scope of a standard intel-gathering mission. The Soldier is very pleased with himself. He folds the piece of paper into quarters, tucks it into his shirt where it rests close to his heart, and falls into his first—and last—dreamless sleep in a long time.

 

 

“You’re here early for a night guard,” the man on the bridge remarks.

Shrug. “Museum closes at five-thirty.”

The man checks his watch, but fails to take the hint and start moving to the exit. He is looking at the guard through a free-standing pane of frosted glass, on which is printed the headline _Rescue from Azzano – Dec 1943_ and a great number of smaller words, along with some ghostly pictures. Standing on the reverse of the display, the night guard sees this in mirror writing, and through it, the visitor’s bright hair and watchful blue eyes.

The hair has been recently trimmed. The night guard likes it.

The man is still peering at him, intent. “Do you usually show up this early?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

They stare at each other. The angle of elevation required to meet the man’s blue eyes indicates that he must be at least an inch taller than the night guard. This, too, is inexplicably pleasing. There is a great deal about this man that is both inexplicable and pleasing.

At length the guard remembers that conversations do not usually survive on monosyllabic responses, and casts about for an elaboration. “We got pre-shift briefings. Stan doesn’t like it when we’re late.” 

“Right,” says the man. He runs a hand through his blond hair, a strangely nervous motion. The lines of his face alter in a way that, correcting for the diffusion and refraction of light through the glass, suggests a wry smile. “I was gonna ask if you wanted to grab a quick coffee. But I guess you don’t have time.”

The night guard is perplexed. “Coffee after five leads to suboptimal sleep. Anyway, I’m working.” 

“I see that,” says the blond man. He hesitates for a split second. Then he goes up on tiptoes, so that his eyes just clear the top of the glass panel, and there is nothing between them but five inches of open air. The guard feels strangely exposed. “You doing all right by yourself, Buck?”

Buck.

Buck. 

Buck. 

It is a name he knows, and he slips into it, easy as sliding his arms through the sleeves of an old worn sweater. “Sure am, Stevie,” he says. “Not to worry.”

The man blinks several times. Then he says, “Okay, I’ll see you around,” and turns and leaves rather quickly.

 

 

That night, the Soldier takes out his Desiderata and adds a new item. 

  1. _Buck  
__(i.e. the present author. But this was already known. Closer study required to determine the nature and extent of the equivalence.)_


  * _nice??_
  * _want to hear again._



 

 

“He sure looks a lot like you,” says Stan. 

0100 hours is the low point of their shift, when the buzz of dinnertime coffee has worn off but the world hasn’t yet attained that early morning quiescence conducive to philosophical musing. They are standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling picture of Sgt. James Buchanan Barnes, a young man with a heroic jawline and the kind of far-focused gaze that hints at a lot of time spent staring at distant objects through rifle scopes, or maybe crying in the dark. He looks like a movie star. He also looks like a dweeb. 

“Huh,” says the night guard, with characteristic eloquence.

Stan looks from him to the poster and back, keen-eyed in the way that only old people can be. “Your nose is the same shape.”

The night guard feels at his face. “It’s nose-shaped?” he suggests.

“Also you have the same colour eyes,” says Stan. “And hair.”

The guard makes shushing sounds and hand motions. “I just heard a noise,” he says, even though he has been hearing it on and off for the last three hours. “From the AV rooms.” 

The diversion serves its purpose. Stan looks first alarmed, then resigned. “Best we go check it out. Can’t have more burglars in here, stealing the shirt off Captain America’s back.”

“The Smithsonian takes security very seriously,” agrees the night guard, parroting a line from the HR manager who’d interviewed him for the important responsibility of watching over certain high-risk exhibits. “You stay here. I’ll deal with it.”

“There might be robbers,” Stan protests. “They might shoot at you.”

“I’ll walk between the bullets,” he promises.

In the daytime, AV Room 5 plays clips from an interview with the former Director of SHIELD at twenty-minute intervals. People who are fond of the Director tend to spend a lot of time there. Sometimes they neglect to leave. The night guard is therefore unsurprised to find one of them hunched in on himself in the darkness of the back row, opening and closing a compass over and over. _Snik, snik, snik_ , the sound he’s been hearing all this while, like Poe’s tell-tale heart.

“For fuck’s sake,” he says. “It’s a blank screen.”

The blond man looks up. The effort of not thinking of him as Steve is starting to give the guard a headache. “I know,” says the man, looking more vexed than abashed. “But it’s like being close to her.”

 _And you_ , the spaces between the words seem to say. The night guard ponders the situation for a moment, then shuts the door so they are in complete darkness and feels his way to where the interloper is sitting. There are no bullets to walk through. The traps that lie between them are of a different sort, invisible but no less invidious. “She’s alive. You can go see her.” 

The man gives a small start. “It says so right there in her bio,” the guard hastens to add. “Nineteen-eighteen dash empty space. They only fill in the blank when you die.” 

The darkness is so thick it has a weight, a texture. The man makes no sound, and the night guard has no reference points to go by. If a blond man sits in the dark, is he still blond? If an intruder trespasses but the guard does not chase him away, is he still an intruder? And—a similar question, but in the converse—if you do not die, but someone fills in the blank after the dash, are you still alive?

“In theory, I guess,” says the—says Steve. He pats the seat beside him. “Don’t stand over me.”

The night guard sits. He cannot see Steve, but he can feel the heat radiating from him, like looking through a snake’s eyes and seeing in infra-red. “This is where you should be running away,” the guard says, even as he sinks deeper into the cushioned seat, “and I should be chasing you.” 

Steve hums in contemplation. “I have ethical objections against running away.”

Memory tells the night guard that this is true. Memory does this by proffering a number of bright and extremely unpleasant images, which he had hoped never to see again. But that is the thing about memory. One never quite escapes the scene of the crime. 

“Why do you work here?” asks Steve suddenly. 

The question is sharp-edged, diabolically aimed, but his voice is gentle and soft around the consonants. The guard takes a deep breath. With the same care, he says, “No human interaction. Nothing to do except walk around empty buildings. The only kind of job I’m qualified for.” 

 _The only other kind of job_ , he should say, but that would betray a degree of self-pity he’s not sure he wants to show Steve. There is a thoughtful, digestive pause. Then—

“Why,” says Steve again, deliberately, with almost exactly the same inflections, “do you work here?”

The night guard sighs. He’s nearly managed to forget what it was like to go toe to toe against Captain Annoying. For a brief moment, he considers getting up and walking away. Nothing’s stopping him. But the velvety hush of the heavy darkness lends the room a sort of confessional quality, a safety the daylight world does not possess, and he finds he _wants_ to answer. “The same as you,” he says. “To be close without being near.”

He wonders if there is a slight pause in the conversation, a hitch in Steve’s breathing, or if his ears are playing tricks on him. It wouldn’t be the first time. “I’m very near you,” Steve points out.

“You’re a pain in the ass.” 

“That I am.” 

His walkie-talkie chooses that moment to emit a burst of static, making them both jump. Stan’s muffled voice comes over the line. “You find the robbers yet, boy?” 

The night guard realises how softly he and Steve have been speaking, as if their very voices might crumble something fragile and fine-spun if they do not take care. He looks at the spot in the blackness that should be Steve’s face, and catches the whiff of tea and peppermint on his warm breath, feels the fabric of his jacket sleeve brush against his own.

He closes his eyes, savouring the moment, trying to draw it out as long as he can. Then he opens them again.

“I have visual on the trespasser,” he says. “In pursuit.” 

The line shuts off. “I said I don’t run away,” Steve protests.

“You wouldn’t be running _away_ ,” says the guard. “Just running. Like exercise.”

“Exercise,” Steve repeats, like he can’t believe his ears. Then the urgency of the situation seems to impress itself upon him, because the next moment he coils himself like a leopard, vaults over the next row of seats, and takes off. 

The night guard is very good at his job, but you can’t catch someone who’s not running away.

 

 

“Kids these days,” says Stan mournfully, patting him down as if to check for injuries. “No respect at all." 

“Terrible,” agrees the guard.

Mentally, the Soldier adds a new point to his Desiderata. _3\. Steve and the dark, a safe place._

 

 

The night guard shows up to the museum earlier and earlier, and the blond man stays later and later. The graph of their intersections makes a very encouraging curve, and is entirely in line with mission objectives.

1600 hours on a Monday—a pleasantly dead point in the museum’s circadian rhythm—finds the guard wandering through the Smithsonian’s less threateningly relevant exhibits, gazing up at the shiny metal hulls of model rockets and early spacecraft. It seems a pity that he spent the sixties sleeping or murdering instead of riding one of these things to the moon, and he takes out his Desiderata—he has transferred the list to a Moleskine journal with a price as outrageous as its quality, with a shiny purple pen to go along—and writes, _4\. SPACE._

He scans the room, but none of the visitors are blond, so he puts the Moleskine away and drifts to the next exhibit hall. This one is dedicated to the first Boeing planes, and contains a promisingly large baseball-capped individual bent over a sketchbook. The guard makes an idle change to his trajectory and rambles over, where he happens to insert himself in the individual’s sightlines. It is so strange how the cosmos seems determined to bring them together.

“Oh,” says Steve. “Hi, Bucky.”

The night guard’s knees fold to deposit him on the bench beside Steve. The hall is not dark like the AV room, and certainly not as empty, but the museum patrons are slow-moving civilians and pose them no threat. It will do. “Bucky,” he essays.

“Is that okay?” asks Steve.

The night guard thinks about it. He is not on guard duty, nor is it night even by the furthest stretch of the imagination. But he has to call himself _something_. He nods once, decisively. “Whatcha drawing?”

Steve tilts the sketchbook so he can see. The page is covered with pencil outlines of little cartoon planes, round-nosed and stubby-winged. They are quite—Bucky searches for the word. Cute. “I keep thinking,” says Steve, with a rueful scrunch of his nose, “that if I draw them enough I’ll stop being afraid to get on them.”

At first blush, the idea of Steve—this great golden god, who moves and stands like he should be on a plinth—being afraid of anything is incomprehensible. Then Bucky thinks of the Valkyrie model in their own exhibit, and begins to understand. “Memory,” he says. “It gives you pictures.” 

Steve nods. “Smells.”

“Voices.”

A group of teenagers passes their bench in a flurry of high-pitched giggles, and Steve ducks his head. When they’re gone, he asks, “How do you fall asleep?”

“I don’t,” says Bucky.

“Well,” says Steve, tapping his pencil against his teeth, “that’s one way to get around the problem.” 

He starts drawing again. After a moment Bucky pulls out his own notebook and pen and joins him. It’s satisfying, moving the nib over the yellow-white paper, watching shapes and forms coalesce. The night guard has never done this before, but the Winter Soldier was good at sketching maps and schematics for his handlers, and he thinks the pouty movie star sergeant even went to classes for things like shading and perspective and composition. He used to spend a lot of time at the easels with a littler Steve, drawing side by side like they’re doing now. It’s… nice. 

Fifteen minutes later he finds that his Boeing sketch has turned into a blueprint of Steve’s head and shoulders; and looking over in a state of some discomfiture, he sees his own face gazing out of Steve’s page, too.

 

 

There is another museum—a tiny showroom, really—not far from the Smithsonian that does not display old planes and dead sergeants. Instead it is a collection of traditional-media art from the thirties and forties, including, it appears, a room dedicated to the sketchbooks of one Steven Grant Rogers. The night guard decides to pay a visit.

This, it transpires, is a mistake.

It is like stepping into a funhouse full of mirrors. He sees himself iterated in all directions, in charcoal and pencil and paint, warped through the strange filters of Steve’s artist eyes. There he is—lounging in a shaft of sunlight, in suspenders and a shirt open nearly to the waist, a grey kitten preening by his head. Naked in the bath, one foot propped on the rim of the tub, rivulets of water streaking down his face from his wet hair. Cleaning his rifle in a green shirt full of holes, an oversized brown jacket draped over his shoulders. He is handsome, and he is horrible, and he is legion.

The night guard shoulders his way out of the place. He knows there is no point even trying to sleep that day, so he goes to the library, checks out as many science books as he can, shows up to work at eleven-thirty in the morning, and spends the rest of the day reading.

 

 

“You need an intervention,” Bucky announces.

This is something Stan has often told the night guard, and it seems applicable now. Almost closing time on a Thursday, the museum beginning to empty out, and there’s Steve in the back row of AV Room 5, sitting alone in the darkness between video screenings. “You’re not on duty yet,” he says, half plaintive, half defensive. “You can’t chase me out.”

Bucky sits down beside him, kicking his shoes off so he can put his feet up on the seat and hug his knees to his chest. “Wasn’t gonna.”

Steve swings his legs fretfully, like the bored grade schoolers often do during the screenings. The soles of his sneakers make scraping sounds on the thick carpet. There’s a group of twentysomethings straggling out after the last screening, and a family of four in the front row waiting for the next, but otherwise they are alone. “I should visit,” he says under his breath. “But sometimes it upsets her, seeing me.”

Steve’s stupid face seems to be a universally upsetting sight. But surely seeing him must be high on Peggy Carter’s list of Desiderata, just like it is on Bucky’s. And surely, if she were in her right mind, she would agree that Steve requires an _intervention_ , whatever that is. “Sometimes,” he says tentatively, “sometimes, when you forget something, it’s a real pain to remember it again.”

Steve stops swinging his legs. It has the immediate effect of making him seem thirty years older. “God,” he says. “I guess you’d know.”

Bucky nods. “It’s like—” He struggles to find a suitable analogy. “Like when you break a bone, and the serum makes it heal all wrong before you can set it, and you gotta break it all over again so it’ll heal right.” 

“But you _want_ to remember,” says Steve. He says this in the same way that the hand of a falling man might scrabble for purchase against the side of a cliff. “You want to break that bone. Otherwise you wouldn’t spend all your time here.”

Bucky has never thought of it this way before. This is a troubling conclusion. It turns the mission from one of reconnaissance to one of rescue, of recovery, and those are always sticky. “I guess.”

Maybe desperation is contagious. His pulse is glitching in a way that suggests cardiac gymnastics most deleterious to health, and the servos in his metal arm are humming with fight-or-flight activity. He rips off his glove and stares at his fingers in disgust. There is nothing to fight. There is nothing to flee from. There is only Steve, who at different times in the past has been both.

From somewhere very close at hand, Steve says, “May I?”

“Sure,” says Bucky, like a knee-jerk under a mallet.

Steve picks up the metal hand in both of his own, cradling it gently, reverently, as if they hadn’t been trying to kill each other the last time they touched. He twines the fingers of his left hand with Bucky’s, and with his right, pushes up the sleeve of Bucky’s shirt. His thumb rests lightly on the inside of the metal wrist, where the pulse point of an ordinary arm would be; and then travels up, over plate and groove and plate and groove, to stroke the crook of Bucky’s elbow.

Bucky can’t fathom what he thinks he’s doing. The room is starting to fill up for the last screening of the Carter interview. A half-dozen sweaty kids in Captain America t-shirts are filing into the row just in front of them, but Bucky wouldn’t have noticed if they sprouted wings and started breathing fire. The inner tectonics of his arm have changed, the feedback from his pressure sensors indicating a feeling similar to goosebumps. The servos give one last whirr, and go still.

“You tamed it,” says Bucky accusingly.

Steve shakes his head. The dim blue light of a settings menu comes on the screen, just enough to illuminate the faint hue of pink rouging his cheeks. He pulls the sleeve back down, and starts to replace the glove on Bucky’s hand. “Nah.”

A part of Bucky’s hindbrain, the primitive reptilian part that finds its kin in crocodiles and other swamp creatures, wants to punch Steve. The limbic system, however—seat of memory and feeling—demands something else entirely. He gazes at Steve in the blue-screen twilight, and the Desiderata acquires several new entries in quick succession. He wants, he wants. The short ruffled bit in the front of Steve’s hair, and how it would feel to tousle it under his hands; if the fine golden strands would catch in the grooves of his finger plates. The light dustings of lashes above his eyes. The angle, the perfect angle where throat runs into shoulder; the little hollow between the collarbones—does it have a taste, what does Steve taste like, he must know, he must, he must.

Steve’s thumb and forefinger are still clasped around the narrowest point of Bucky’s wrist, like a bracelet, and his expression is several shades shy of terrified. “Stevie,” says Bucky, exasperated. “It’s fine,” and then, “Come here.”

Steve shifts closer to him, and then keeps going, so first their noses collide and then their mouths meet. It’s a sliver of a fraction of a promise of a kiss, a lot of lip and teeth and the slightest hint of tongue, just long enough for Bucky to taste the answer to his questions; and then they pull apart, too aware of the kids three feet away. “All right?” asks Steve.

He’s endearingly nervous. “All right,” says Bucky. His arm is buzzing again, and so, less loudly, is his heart. This is something new, something you wouldn’t find in a museum, not theirs or the scary one with the funhouse art; this is something the runway model sergeant didn’t try, and the Winter Soldier never even imagined. This belongs to the night guard and it is his and his alone.

He mulls this over, and says, “You had a breath mint and something spicy for lunch.”

Steve wrinkles his nose, looking affronted. “Yeah? You just had a cappuccino.”

“I had three,” Bucky informs him, and they start to giggle, and have to shush each other as the screen grows bright and Peggy comes on.

 

 

Bucky is late for work—isn’t that an irony—and then he falls asleep halfway through his shift, curled up in a small ball at the feet of the Commando figurines. He wakes up at dawn with a crick in his neck and Stan sitting on a plastic chair beside him, nursing a coffee. “You didn’t wake me,” says Bucky indignantly.

Stan gives a noncommittal grunt, a quintessentially old-man noise, and swirls his coffee in its styrofoam cup. He’s looking at the giant face of the Fallen Comrade pouting on the far wall. “You ex-military, boy?”

Bucky sits up. “I’m ex- a lot of things.”

“I can see that,” says Stan, and sighs in a wistful sort of way, handing him a second cup. “Aren’t we all.”

 

 

Bucky runs into Steve outside the lobby of the Smithsonian at five-thirty the next evening, both of them slightly out of breath. “You’re usually here by now,” he remarks.

Steve is dressed up a bit, which for him means he’s wearing a button-up instead of his usual sweatshirt under the ubiquitous leather jacket, and his baseball cap matches his shoes. “So are you.”

“I slept in,” says Bucky. It still feels vaguely surreal, like the moon landings. “And then I went to the library.”

“I went to the hospice,” says Steve.

It has taken something out of him. It doesn’t seem like it, but you have to know where to look—the set of his jaw, the slight sag to his shoulders, the vague pallour of his cheeks. He looks tired, but also more relaxed than Bucky has ever seen him. Same old Steve, never shying away from anything because it’s painful. _There you are_ , Bucky thinks, and something long dormant in his heart stirs its wings and turns over, whuffling in its sleep. “Attaboy.”

Steve smiles. A horde of preschoolers and their shepherds emerges from the sliding glass doors of the lobby just then, and they draw together by dint of unspoken agreement, drifting over to the parking lot to get out of the way. They stand beneath a streetlamp, their shoulders touching, and the backs of their hands brush through Bucky’s glove. This seems extremely propitious, a once-in-a-millennium alignment of the planets. After some brief but furious consideration Bucky catches Steve’s knuckles between his own to keep them there, and Steve’s smile broadens.

“It’s closing time,” says Bucky reproachfully. “You can’t go in.”

“I know,” says Steve. “But I wanted to see you.” He hesitates. The child avalanche passes, leaving them alone again. They are still holding knuckles. “What are you doing after work?”

Bucky blinks, wrong-footed. “I dunno,” he says. “Nothing.” Then mission control kicks in, and his brain catches up with his mouth. “I’m open to suggestions.”

Steve’s smile widens still more. “I’ll pick you up. We can grab waffles, go to the Reflecting Pool and watch the sunrise.”

Bucky has the strange, stupid sensation that he _is_ already watching the sun go up, unfurling in a microcosm in a parking lot outside a museum. This is what is called a date, he knows, and embarking on one with Steve will be like accelerating a plane down a runway that ends in the sea. You either take off or you crash.

There is heat spreading up his neck. For the first time in a long while, he is unafraid.

“Sure,” he says. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Steve flushes with pleasure. He leans in, pecks Bucky on the cheek, and then beats such a hasty retreat that Bucky has to question his ethical objections to running away.

 

 

“You’re on sick leave today,” says Stan as soon as Bucky walks into the guardroom.

“What?” says Bucky. “No.” 

“Yes,” says Stan. He shoves a pair of horn-rimmed dark glasses into Bucky’s hands, and then, as an afterthought, a wad of cash. “I just got a call from the Feds. They think the wosshisname, the Winter Soldier’s working here. There’s SWAT teams coming.” 

Muscle memory is a powerful thing. An apex predator yearns for the kill even long after the hunt is over, and his servos whirr to life, his fist longing to sing through the air. But an older incarnation of Bucky—deeper-rooted, yet closer to the surface—remembers what it is to be the prey. “Fuck,” he says. 

Faint sirens are already wailing in the distance. It’s like a shot of adrenaline straight to the spine. “Better not go home,” says Stan. “HR has your address on file.” With what seems like inordinate relish, he adds, “I’ll go get in their way.”

Forming words is a herculean effort; arranging them into sentences is impossible. Bucky fumbles in his backpack and pulls out his Moleskine. “If Steve comes—” 

Stan pockets the Desiderata. “Got it, son.” 

He shuffles to the door. Bucky puts on the shades, but leaves the cash. He takes one last look around the room, with its swivel chairs and ancient computer monitors, the coffee cups mouldering in the trash, trying to fix it in his memory forever; and then his gaze lands on a stack of old leaflets for the Captain America exhibit. Steve’s face stares unseeingly past him, eyes fixed perpetually on a spot above and to the left of Bucky’s own. 

 _Steve_ , the night guard thinks.

His heart strikes a single note out of time, then resumes its rapid rabbit patter. He seizes one of the flyers, squeezes through the guardroom window, and starts to run.

 

 

He winds up at the airport, the only place there really is to go.

He never thought to get Steve’s number. Steve might be a world-spanning, time-crossing creature, but the thing cobwebbing between them was a mathematical construct with no place in the real world, belonging only to the liminal space of the museum by night. Even now, there are ways Bucky could find him. But he has a vision of Steve standing between him and the police lights, shield up, fists raised, a hundred guns on him, and it is an idea his stomach cannot countenance. Alone is better.

In the duty-free stationery store he buys a new notebook for his desired things and writes in big letters all across the first page: _TO STAY._

He goes.

 

 

In Bucharest, Romania, he stops running long enough to get a job as an night-time security guard at a gym. He works out, and reads, and watches Steve in Sokovia on the news.

It’s not the same.

 

 

In the end, the Smithsonian ebbs away from him like a recurring dream he stops having, real and not real all at once. But other things stay. When he comes home from the market one afternoon to find the thread wedged in his doorhinge gone and a chilly draft gusting through the open kitchen window, he knows at once who it must be.

Steve, timeless and golden, looks exactly like he did a year ago. He’s in civvies: a ratty sweatshirt faded from washing, jeans with rips in them that don’t look factory-made, and the same baseball cap he’d been wearing that five-thirty evening when they’d said goodbye in a parking lot without knowing that they had. Cradled in his big hands, the Desiderata looks tiny and priceless. Even from here, the night guard can see which page he’s looking at. 

He can swear he made no sound, he’s not even _breathing_ , but Steve’s head comes up a few inches. There is a perilous pause. “I would have run with you,” he says, “if you’d asked.”

The night guard says, “That’s exactly why I didn’t.” 

He has fallen out of the habit of speaking English, and the syllables come out thick and rusty. Steve closes the notebook and sets it back down. When he turns around, it is a slow, measured movement, like he’s afraid, not of what memory might do to him but what he might do to it. “I have the other book,” he says. 

His expression is gobsmack-blank, his eyes transfixed to Bucky’s. He hasn’t shaved in days. In a regular person, Bucky suspects, the undereye shadows would be taking over his face right about now. “You been living rough, Stevie?”

“You _left_ ,” says Steve, as if that answers everything. His spine is rigid. “I came to pick you up from the Smithsonian. I had _flowers._ ”

Of course he did, for fuck’s sake. Of course he’s found Bucky when all the militaries and intelligence agencies of the world couldn’t, because no one does mulish bloody-mindedness quite like Steve Rogers. “Steve—”

“I went and put them on your _grave_ ,” says Steve, still in that machine-gun voice. “I thought you might be dead again. I thought I was the last one left.”

When he can speak, Bucky says, “I’m sorry about Peggy.”

“You weren’t even at the funeral,” says Steve through a clenched jaw. He looks very heroic, and only a tiny bit hysterical. “I looked.” 

“I wanted to go,” says Bucky. His voice feels loud and echoey inside his own head. “Steve, I really did. But it would only have made things worse. You’re kind of proving my point.”

Steve takes a few jerky steps across the room. His hands clench and unclench. He looks like he’s about to smite someone with the force of his righteous rage. Bucky starts forward, impelled by a will not quite part of his conscious mind but bigger than it; and in a very tiny voice, Steve says, “Bucky?”

“Yeah,” says Bucky, through the tightness in his throat. “Yeah, I’m here, it’s okay.”

He closes the distance between them, folding himself into Steve’s arms; and then he just stands there for a long time, warming up from the outside in, aware of little else but the soft, muffled hiccups in Steve’s breathing and the tremble of his shoulders, and of the beading moisture in the corners of his own eyes.

 

 

They take a shower in Bucky’s shoebox bathroom, not doing much, really, just holding on to each other as the water drums against the cubicle walls and sluices down their skin. Afterwards Steve gets dressed in some of Bucky’s things—the t-shirt sits strangely on his broad shoulders, and the sweatpants reveal quite a few scandalous inches of ankle—and they sit up on the roof of the building, snacking on Bucky’s plums and candy bars and eating peanut butter out of the bottle. “You ever plan on coming home?” asks Steve. 

One of Bucky’s stray cat friends, a fat orange tabby called Anka, is sniffing hopefully at Steve’s fingers. Bucky sighs, batting her away. He supposes they’ll have to talk about this eventually, and better now than later. “Pal,” he says, “I think you and I have very different definitions of that word.” 

Steve echoes his sigh. “Probably.”

He hands the peanut butter over—already half finished—and Bucky takes a scoop. He feels, rather than sees, Steve’s eyes linger on his lips and the machinations of his throat muscles. “The thing is,” says Bucky, and it’s taking nearly all of his brain power just to keep the words in English and make them come out in the right order, “the stint at the Smithsonian, that was a mission I gave myself. For intel. And now it’s done, there’s no use going back there.” He swallows. “That would be like—”

“—sitting in the dark in AV Room 5 until security chases you out,” Steve puts in.

Bucky smiles, not in censure. “Yeah.”

“So what then?” asks Steve. Bucky presses the peanut butter into his hands, and he stares down into the bottle as if the dregs might tell him the future, while Anka _mrr_ s and attempts to climb his head. “Now you have your memory back?”

“Not all of it,” says Bucky gently. Most of what he remembers still scares him, and he had all that in his head from the beginning, long before he ever set foot in their exhibit. “I figure I can make new ones. I’ve got nothing but time, anyway.”

Anka summits the fluffy golden top of Mt. Steven, tumbles down the other side, and lands on her feet in Bucky’s lap. Bucky scratches her behind the ears, conscious of Steve’s watchful gaze on his hands. “You mind having company?” Steve asks after a minute.

Bucky’s heart does an ill-advised leap, concussing itself on the inside of his ribcage. Hope is only painful when it’s aware of itself. His fingers go still in the cat’s thick fur. “Steve,” he says. “I ran away because I didn’t want you overturning your life for me.”

Steve’s brow creases up. “I don’t see any SWAT teams coming to arrest you now.” 

“You know what I mean.”

Steve ducks his head. He reaches for Bucky’s metal hand, and Bucky lets him work the glove off, lets him trail his fingers gently along the grooves. There is a sudden purring noise that almost certainly came out of Anka. “I dunno, Buck,” says Steve. “I think my life was already pretty overturned before you came back into it.”

“You don’t say.”

“I have new memories to make, too,” says Steve. He lifts Bucky’s fingers to his lips and kisses them one by one, a little hopeful, a little sad. Thumb, index, middle, ring, pinkie. “Plus I think your cat likes me.” 

Bucky has to smile. He feels the way he does after a good cry: exhausted, empty and full all at once, the world washed clean and bright. “Yeah, well,” he says, allowing his head to tip forward and rest on Steve’s shoulder. “What can I say, you’re pretty damn loveable.”

 

 

Later, he sits up all night and well into the morning, watching Steve sleep starfished over three-quarters of the rickety cot. He feels like he should write something in his Desiderata, something perhaps to do with the boyish disarray of Steve’s hair and the faint constellations of freckles between his shoulderblades, and the way his lips spark little fires when he touches them to Bucky’s skin. But he doesn’t know. There’s just too much.

At length, after careful consideration, he writes, _This_.

Then he closes the book, puts it on the nightstand, and lies down as best as he can beside Steve. He’s asleep as soon as his head touches the pillow, even as the stars recede, and a late sunrise steals over the streets and housetops of Bucharest.

**Author's Note:**

> come check out my [tumblr](http://dirtybinary.tumblr.com) or my [gay arch-nemeses novel](http://valeaida.tumblr.com/post/149576789996/an-elegy-info-post)


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